Two for the price of one

First of all let me apologise for the absence of my creative writing during the month of September. As a result, and in order to make up for my shortcomings, I will share with you all the latest and most important for this month and the last. 

As the days become shorter and Coca Cola holiday season adverts brace our TV screens it is clear we are heading into the business end of the year. We welcome autumn with a number of important fairs to see us through the long winter. 

To kick off with in September we had Cersaie in Bologna. “Cersaie 2013 registers more than 100,000 attendees, with international visitors (+4.2%) making up almost 50% of the total. The building crisis has led to a fall in numbers of Italian visitors (-12.3%)” is the attendance feedback from the Cersaie organisers. There were 302 international exhibitors from 34 different countries, again underlining the importance and trend setting that comes from the show in Italy.

From my personal experience I found that this years trend in tiling was very heavily focused on imitating wood. This was by no means a new trend but seemed like it would be further targeted in the coming year.  What I found to be different this time around was use of lights in combination with tiling, both built into the tiles themselves or as a backlighting setting behind panels. Overall some very interesting designs. Also there were a number of mosaic designs that caught my eye. Here you can see a few pics from the show but if you want to see more please visit our Facebook page.

Then there was Marmomacc in Verona, a very important and highly rated exhibition for the stone industry. This was seen by the fact that a new record number of 143 different countries were represented from the 1400 exhibitors present.  Coupled with over 56,000 visitors the exhibition is hailed as a success and a great sign that the industry is starting to recover from the recent economic downfalls. Show itself was great as ever with some very impressive looking interior and exterior designs.

Finally in October we took our road show to Holz, Basel for Switzerland’s most important woodworking exhibition. Much smaller in comparison to the other two but as always with wood industry exhibitions the whole show was a lot more hands on and some of the furniture designs on display were just mind blowing!  A very good mix of CNC machinery, software solutions and home design ideas inspired over 35,000 visitors.

Domestically in Stuttgart our biggest focus has been the upcoming release of Palette CAD 8.1 service pack and updates for a number of industry libraries including tiles, wood engineering and interior design.  Safe to say this will keeps us busy and warm for the rest of 2013. There are some very exciting improvements in version 8.1 but I will give you more details when you tune in for another tantalising read next month. Until then make sure you take a look at our extended gallery from the shows above to draw some inspiration yourselves and get creative!

Greeting from sunny Stuttgart,

Your Palette CAD-Blog Team